Roots (Haley)

Book Reviews
The book is an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting.
New York Times


Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one (A Times Book of the Century).
Charles McGrath - New York Times Books


A Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the family ancestry of author Alex Haley... [and] a symbolic chronicle of the odyssey of African Americans from the continent of Africa to a land not of their choosing.
Washington Post


A gripping mixture of urban confessional and political manifesto, it not only inspired a generation of black activists, but drove home the bitter realities of racism to a mainstream white liberal audience.
Observer (UK)


Groundbreaking.
Associated Press


(Starred review.) [T]he story of the young African boy named Kunte Kinte, who in the late 1700s was kidnapped from his homeland and brought to the United States as a slave. Haley follows Kunte Kinte's family line over the next seven generations, creating a moving historical novel spanning 200 years.
Publishers Weekly


When Roots was published in the mid-1970s, America was still in a period of introspection caused by all things Watergate and the bicentennial celebration. Haley's self-described "novelized amalgam" chronicled seven generations of his family, from West Africa to the United States and back. Roots—both the book and the groundbreaking TV miniseries that followed—became a cultural phenomenon.  [Though listed as nonfiction on the cover, Roots is generally considered historical fiction. - Ed.]
Library Journal


Roots is the fictionalized account of Alex Haley's family history and an epic narrative of the African American experience.... The story traces Haley's family history from the imagined birth of his ancestor Kant Kin in an African village in 1750 to the death, seven generations later, of his father in Arkansas. Based on fifteen years of research by Haley, the novel is a combination of fact and fiction...that puts a human face on the suffering of black people through the ordeal of the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Grow. Its combination of compelling, affectionate storytelling and informative history has had a revolutionary effect on the way Americans—black and white—think about the history of a people.
Sacred Fire